I spent Saturday getting my usual metric buttload of new Transformers toys, as it was the official street date for Age of Extinction stuff to go out. The Targets didn't have much, and Walmarts weren't much better, but Toys"R"Us at least fulfilled their part of the contract, so I didn't go home empty handed. Transformers movie toy street dates have kind of diminished over the years. For the first movie, the street date felt like an actual event that stores cared about. Everyone put their stuff out immediately and everywhere. Everyone had their own exclusives out the first day, too. It was a Thing. These days, it feels like they're shrugging a little, even though TF movie stuff still outsells the non-movie stuff by a large margin.

I've decided to talk about Crosshairs first, since he was a pleasant surprise. I mean, of course the Dinobots are gonna be sweet-ass Transformers dinosaur toys, and there's an Optimus and a Bumblebee as per usual, but Crosshairs I actually had pretty low expectations for. It's probably related to how poorly most folks seem to transform him, Hasbro included. In a lot of images of him, his shoulders aren't transformed out of car mode, so he's got this giant immobile block of plastic surrounding his torso and head. But hey, no, that all moves away and into position. The rear bumper folds back behind the torso and the shoulders lower and separate. The wheels fold back. He looks way less like an upscaled Legends Class toy when properly converted.

He also has, you know, a trenchcoat. And goggles, too, but the trenchcoat is a neat motif! Rubberized parts fold out from inside the car kibble to plug into his ribcage so it looks like a spreading open bit of clothing. Man, I bet the folks at Hasbro saw concept images of this guy and thanked whoever their respective gods are. I mean, he's got a kibble coat. You don't have to engineer most of the car panels into robot parts, you just have to hang them off the back of him and he's accurate.

For this reason, he isn't very hard to get back into car mode. You just take everything and plug it back in, for the most part. There is some fiddling, and everything moves, but nothing moves very far.

The only weirdness is that only one half of his car mode gets deco. Is the actual real-life vehicle like this or something? Because it doesn't really make any sense -- he's packaged in robot mode, so it's not like Hasbro's putting the painted half of the car mode out in front of the package like a bunch of dicks. It is legitimately boggling.

He comes with three weapons. He gets two smaller pistols which peg into the insides of his coat and one larger rifle. In the one clip of him in the trailers, he has two of that larger rifle. Dangit. Oh well.

I like him, at any rate. Doesn't-Realize-Matrix-Trilogy-Isn't-A-Thing-Anymore trenchcoat dude is all right by my book.